The close proximity of poverty and the persisting desire to buy and sell shows that while consumerism is often considered a Western phenomenon, the obsession is now shared by most humans around the world.
And while consumerism typically has a negative effect on the world's forests - everything, it seems, comes from the rainforest - it isn't necessarily true this year, or at least there is reason to be optimistic.
Many of us spent a significant portion of the weekend chuckling at the Day of the Locusts-like stampede of porcine consumers doing flatscreen-judo on the killing floors of Walmarts throughout the country, all the while decrying mindless consumerism even as we echoed the mindless reactionary talking points on our corporate overlord Facebook.
During several songs, Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie's vocals are feedback-tinged or plain inaudible, while oblique consumerism critique Paco and Another Breakfast With You sound not just harsh, but like spanners being thrown about in an empty gasometer.
And it is experiencing extraordinary rates of urban growth: the Suzhou Industrial Park is a cathedral to consumerism, while the lights at Harmony Times Square illuminate a surrounding urban sprawl littered with construction projects.
The magazine was succeeding on several different fronts: holding up a campy mirror to late-90's consumerism while becoming a must-have object itself (what Noguchi coffee table would be complete without it?), increasing revenues and catapulting its editor into the heights of design-world prominence.
A group of credentialled delegates was huddled in front of a black-and-white portrait of Janis Joplin (her "Mercedes Benz," a lonesome folk-rock song from 1970, bemoans rampant consumerism) while Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On" (an homage, from 2001, to free-form sex) played over a loudspeaker.
These films provide mild criticism of consumerism while encouraging family values.
First-time director and novelist Guo based this romance and its upcoming sequel on his bestselling series of books, and the resulting film has been decried for its oh-so-American consumerism while making more than $90 million at the domestic box office.
— galvanizing treatise on somber topics like public school education, class and midlife consumerism, all the while eliciting at least one snort of laughter per page, is no less than a feat of genius.
Why isn't anyone debating whether the hyper-sexualization of teenage girls and hyper-materialism that claims to be critiquing fame and consumerism, even while shoving it down our throats, is doing us any good as a society?
